Interventions from the Global South

Mohan Dutta 00:02
ICA presents.

From the International Communication Association Podcast Network, this is Interventions from the Global South. In this introductory episode, we'll go over what the global south means and why communication scholars are interested in the Global South. I will discuss the conceptual registers organizing frameworks and anchors for imagination rooted in the Global South, both historically and in the context of contemporary global challenges. We'll dive deep into questions of sovereignty, collectivization, embeddedness, connection and other concepts that are central to understanding communication in and from the Global South. Finally, we will look at the questions this series will help answer.

Welcome. I am Mohan Dara, Director of the Center for Culture Centered Approach to Research and Evaluation, or CARE, at Massey University in Aotearoa, New Zealand, your host for the ICA, podcast Interventions from the Global South.

So what is - and more importantly, where is - the Global South?

The Global South is both a cartographic construction and a material construction. It is a reference to the spaces of the Southern Hemisphere, historically the sites of colonial intervention.

So this kind of a hemispheric approach, then, specifically locates the North as the site of colonialism and capitalism, and then imagines the South as the site of the workings of interventions directed by capitalism and colonialism.

The concept of the Global South connects us to anti-colonial struggles that occupied the global imaginary particularly in the 1920s, 30s, and then going all the way into the 1970s.

On one hand, communities that make up the global south are the targets of the extractive forces of capital. And on the other hand, the people from within these communities are expelled from these spaces of extraction through the capitalist processes.

You have ongoing productions of spaces of exception. This can be in the form of large-scale factory infrastructures, detention camps, migration centers. These can be your special economic zones where capital flows freely without resistance because labor laws have been systematically attacked, or these can be places where particular forms of interventions have been created in order to sustain the conditions of bonded or enslaved labor.

When we think about the emergent struggles within the global South, a key concept is that of sovereignty. How does a community, a society, maintain or retain its ownership of its imaginative and material resources without being displaced by the workings of capitalism and colonialism?

Yet another feature of these global south struggles is a notion of embeddedness; that theory and practice are deeply intertwined with each other. Theorizing has to be embedded within the politics of struggles against ongoing forms of dispossession.

And finally, global south practices of theorizing are connected to a politics of transformation and resistance. If it is dispossession that has been conceptualized, how do we then change these practices of dispossession? Theorizing from the global south offers possibilities of ways of being, anchored in alternative values systems that orient very differently from the individualizing profiteering logics of global capital.

In this backdrop, then, what we have also observed is the tremendous resistance that has been put up by the peoples of the global south. So global South, in that sense, is an invitation to the basis for creating alternative forms of being that challenged the predatory forces of colonialism and capitalism.

We will be asking, what does it mean to theorize communication from the Global South? What does communication theory look like when engaged with questions that are relevant to the Global South? What do the disciplinary terrains look like when approached from the intellectual and practical questions that are emergent from the struggles in the Global South?

I'm really excited about these conversations that are going to take place as part of this podcast series. I am looking forward to being in various dialogic spaces across the Global South. I look forward to having you with me on this journey and look forward to your participation in this dialogue.

This episode of the interventions from the global south podcast series is presented by the International Communication Association and is sponsored by the Institute for Advanced Study in the Global South at Northwestern University Qatar, which produces and promotes evidence-based storytelling focused on histories, cultures, societies, and media of the Global South. Our producer is Ilana Arougheti. Our executive producer is Aldo Diaz Caballero. Our production coordinator is Nick Song. The theme music is by Sleeping Ghost. If you'd like to hear more about our sponsor, please check the show notes in the episode description. Thanks for listening.